"It's getting to the point where you don't have to have
done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall
under suspicion from somebody — even by a wrong call — and then
they can use this system to go back in time and
scrutinize every decision decision you've even made, ever friend
you've discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to
sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint
anyone in the context of a wrongdoer."

Some people (including
BI's Henry Blodget) are skeptical about Snowden's
stunning claims, but it should be noted that the alleged ability
of the NSA to collect Internet traffic and crunch it to profile
any American has been corroborated by several other reporters and
whistleblowers.

Furthermore, New York Times writers James Risen and Eric
Lichtblau — who won aPulitzer Prize in
2005 for this storyon warrantless government
surveillance — report that "Verizon had set up a dedicated
fiber-optic line ... allowing government officials to gain access
to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations
center."

“More and more services like Google and Facebook have
become huge central repositories for information,” Dan Auerbach,
a technology analyst with theElectronic Frontier
Foundation,
told The Times. “That’s created a pile of data that is
an incredibly attractive target for law enforcement and
intelligence agencies.”

The scary
thing, as Snowden points out, is that the bulk of the attractive
targets arising from that data are innocent Americans.